I have read a bunch of threads on this topic, so it seems to be a fairly common occurance, however none of the solutions seem to work.

I have a new iBook G4 running the 2.6.11-r6 kernel. Everything works for the most part with this kernel (other than a few annoyances). I wanted to upgrade to the 2.6.11-r11 kernel to hopefully iron out some of the annoyances, but now when I try to boot with that kernel, the system freezes with the last line output being "openpic: exit". I have used the same config for the most part, with a couple tweaks, nothing that should affect this.

Some people have suggested this is a problem with framebuffer, but my framebuffer worked fine in the r6 kernel. I have also tried to turn off the bootlogo, and appended video=radeon into my kernel options.

Now this isn't too critical for me to solve, since I do have a working kernel, but what causes this? I would like to upgrade my kernel eventually.

The only reason you'll have a lock there is that the correct fb device isn't loaded. It's radeonfb, not radeon, perhaps try this this? If this does't work, post the fb section of your config. I would also suggest using 2.6.12 over 2.6.11, there were a number of radeon fixes in .12._________________Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

Well I did the upgrade to 2.6.12, and everything worked great. It also seems to have gotten rid of the two annoying bugs I was having. I still am not sure what was wrong in the 2.6.11-r8 and r11, but I'm happy it works now.